Visual Studio 2008 is released and much more

I know everyone has been playing with the beta of Visual Studio 2008 but you don't have to any longer!  Visual Studio 2008 Express flavors have been released into the wild for everyone to enjoy.

• Visual Basic Express Edition – productivity tool for first time or casual Windows programming
• Visual C# Express Edition – provides a great combination of power and productivity
• Visual C++ Express Edition – provides the horsepower with a finer degree of control
• Visual Web Developer Express Edition – the easy to use environment for dynamic Web development

I have a great idea but how do I code?

• Check out the Beginner Developer Learning Center over at http://msdn.microsoft.com/beginner.  Everything you need to start off slow and build either Web or Windows applications using Visual Studio Express.

The Game Creators Partnership and Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition

• Microsoft partnered with The Game Creators to offer the C++ community TGC’s GDK.  The GDK will provide a powerful game development story for the Visual C++ audience.  The Game Creators will provide a free developer license for their GDK product to the VS Express audience.  You can find more over at http://www.microsoft.com/express/samples/gamecreators.

Coding4Fun Developer Kits!

• The C4F Developer Kit is an offering of 20+ components and controls that offer developers a great opportunity to create cool, fun applications with technology that may be otherwise too complex or require countless hours of research and coding.  The toolkit hosts controls for things like Bluetooth, Speech, TAPI, Calendar and much, much more.  We’ve rolled this out on CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com/c4fdevkit) to allow the community to share and add to it.  The second toolkit is perhaps the most amazing of all.  The C4F Vista P2P Toolkit offers developers the ability to create peer-to-peer applications for WinForms and WPF with no lines of code.  Built on top of the WCF, we created a set of controls that developers simply drag ‘n drop on their design surface and simply select from the Smart Tags which pieces to hook up.  They have prebuilt controls for Chat, file sharing and streaming audio and video.  Again, like the C4F Developer Kit, this too can be found on CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com/c4fp2p).